It is common for companies to operate physical facilities, often called “distribution centers,” where they store units of products and other items, and from which they ship item units. The term “item” as used herein generally refers to a class of things, substantially identical instances—or “units”—of which class may be purchased, received, stored, sold, and/or shipped. As an example, a distribution center may receive five units of a Toshiba SD2710 DVD Player item, and later ship out one unit of this item, leaving it with four units of this item.
Types of companies operating distribution centers include: merchants that accept customer orders for item units in various ways, such as via telephone, fax, the World Wide Web, or electronic mail, and themselves operate one or more distribution centers to fulfill these orders by shipping the ordered item units to the ordering customers; product manufacturers that operate distribution centers to ship item units they've manufactured to wholesalers, distributors, retail merchants, and/or retail customers; wholesalers and distributors that operate distribution centers to receive item units from their manufacturers and ship them to retail merchants; and large retail merchants that operate many stores, who purchase large quantities of item units sold in the stores, hold the ordered item units in a distribution center until they are needed in the stores, and at that point ship item units from the distribution center to the stores.
It is often important to know what business entity (“owner”) owns the item units residing in a distribution center. As one example, it is often important for an owner of item units to know whether the number of units of a particular item that it owns at a particular distribution center is adequate for its purposes; if not, it may need to order more of that item. Accordingly, most distribution centers use some sort of explicit or implicit approach to designate the entity that owns each unit of each item. For some distribution centers, all of the item units residing there belong to a single owner, which may either be the operator of the distribution center or a separate entity. Accordingly, any item unit present in such a distribution center is known to be owned by the single owner.
In other distribution centers, multiple owners each own some item units residing in the distribution centers. Such distribution centers typically employ one of two different conventional item unit ownership approaches. In the first conventional approach, for each item residing in a distribution center, only one owner (an “exclusive owner”) owns any units of that item. Accordingly, when units of a particular item are present anywhere within the distribution center, they are known to be owned by the exclusive owner for that item. A significant disadvantage of the first conventional approach is that one owner utilizing a distribution center using this approach may be prevented from using the distribution center to distribute a particular item because a different owner is already using the distribution center to distribute that item.
In the second conventional approach, two or more owners may own units of the same item, but units of the item owned by different owners must be physically segregated from one another. For example, units of the same item owned by different owners may be stored in separate bins, or in different areas of the distribution center. Accordingly, the owner of a particular unit of such an item can be determined based upon the unit's location. A significant disadvantage of the second conventional approach is that it can become space- and labor-intensive to segregate units of the same item in this manner, making it less efficient and more expensive to operate the distribution center.
In light of the foregoing, a new approach to tracking the ownership of item units residing in a distribution center that required neither prohibiting more than one owner from owning units of the same item nor physical segregation of units of the same item owned by different owners would have significant utility.